


Car Crash Hearts

by orphan_account



Category: Benedict Cumberbatch - Fandom, Real Person Fiction
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-17
Updated: 2012-09-17
Packaged: 2017-11-14 11:18:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/514670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five more minutes, one last phone call, a forgotten scarf. Any of it could matter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Here we go, just a little something something. I know RPF is not everyone's cup of tea, so if it's not yours, please don't feel obliged to read this.

“Where are you?”

He’s irritated. Only just, but it’s there, and she most certainly hears it.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m running out the door now, I promise.” 

She is lying. Just a little bit, of course—but it will matter, that lie, that little lie. Because if she had been running out the door at just that moment, he’ll think later, things would’ve been different. Fine. But she isn’t running out the door. She is sitting on the edge of her bed, balancing her phone between her ear and her shoulder as she straps herself into a pair of bright red pumps.

The thing is, she is never late. To anything. It’s a joke between them: he is perpetually ten minutes late to everything, despite his best intentions; and she has never managed to arrive later than ten minutes early to anything her entire life. Meaning together they generally arrived just on time to every tireless premiere/gala opening/charity fundraiser after another.

But this time there had been things. Wasn’t that always the way? One silly thing after another, one silly reason to not step out the door a minute sooner, catch the proceeding cab, make that last green light. An inconsequential text she stopped to answer, a last-second sip of juice she sneaked from the container in the fridge. A bright silk scarf she thought, passing by the mirror in the front hall, would compliment her outfit—he’d given it to her for her birthday just last month; it was beautiful. So she’d gone back to grab it from her closet, teetering away in her heels, still apologizing for her unusual tardiness to her boyfriend on the far end of the line. And it took just too much time to go back for it, just that bit too much time—

“Please hurry,” he says.

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” she says.

\---------- ---------- ----------

Benedict waits twenty minutes. Hell, he waits thirty… forty, with two glasses of champagne clutched in a single hand: one is empty and the other is flat. He pulls his phone from his trouser pocket and checks it again. Nothing. His last six sent text messages are all to the same number:

Are you close?

I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier.

They’ve closed down the carpet so I’m waiting out by the back entrance.

Love?

Where are you?

Hello?

He’s rung her but each time it goes straight to her voicemail. Having been assured twice now that Really, Sir, and film’s about to start and he should go in, Benedict finally hands off the champagne flutes, pockets his phone again, and with a feeling of irritation and unease coming over him, makes his way into theater alone.

\---------- ---------- ----------

There’s a reception after the film, of course, for the delicately swarming mass of beautiful things to buoy their spirits with alcohol and industry gossip. Benedict should be among them, one more voice waffling inconsequential opinions and doling out desperate snippets of praise to all who think they deserve it, churning out the same lines to each old face, not caring if he’s repeating himself because everyone’s attention is stretched too thin to care much, flitting as they all are between half a dozen lines of conversation. 

But he isn’t. 

He’s stood in a far corner with his phone once again splayed upon his palm. He calls her number again, again, again. Nothing.

“I think I’m going to head out,” he tells a bored acquaintance standing at his elbow. The man’s fingers are dancing along his Blackberry keyboard and the statement takes a moment to register.

“Oh, yeah, sure.” He keeps typing.

“Right,” says Benedict, turning to leave.

“Wait, are you heading back up to Hampstead?” the man asks, oddly concerned. With no other ideas about where he might find his disappeared girlfriend besides the flat they share there, that’s exactly where he’s going.

“Yeah, why?”

“I was just going to suggest, if you usually take Tottenham Court Road back, that you don’t. There was an accident there earlier; I saw it on my way over. It might be cleared up by now, but it was pretty bad—I just figured it’s probably best to avoid it.” The report is delivered with an air of nonchalance. He gives Benedict a hope-it-helps smile and a small wave off, and disappears into the glittering crowd. There’s a weight like a rock settling in the pit of Benedict’s stomach.

At that, he slips out of the hall. The August air is cool and damp and he’s swiping his fingers across his phone’s screen, navigating to BBC News. It only takes a minute to find mention of the accident—and a picture: there’s a lorry toppled over in the road, on top of another vehicle, with a handful of cabs and the like crushed and piled-up against its side. In the picture the scene has already been taped off, and there are paramedics skirting along the perimeter. He reads: three dead on the scene, a dozen more rushed to a nearby hospital.

He looks at the picture again and sees—but oh god, he almost wishes he doesn’t see—a bright golden scarf lying on the pavement near one of the crumpled cabs. It’s unmistakable. And it’s soaked through with blood. 

He’s on his bike and racing towards the UCL A&E before he can properly feel sick.


	2. Chapter 2

It’s dark now, but there are headlights and break lights and traffic lights all careening around him, burning a path through central London. His heart is pounding in his ears and he can’t quite catch his breath, so he leaves his mouth open as he speeds along the familiar roads, allowing air to rush in and out of his lungs of its own accord. Benedict must try very hard not to think of anything except the motions of dodging in and between cabs, lest he start to see her, sprawled across the pavement, her body crushed like so many of the cars around her, leaking blood like petrol from some unseen fissure—

Fuck.

A car in front of him stops short and Benedict jumps his bike onto the pavement to avoid the collision, shooting around a fire hydrant and down a narrow side street towards the hospital. The way is cobbled and his teeth clatter together painfully.

Concentrate, Cumberbatch, he tells himself.

He can’t think of her like that. He can’t. He won’t. He doesn’t. As he searches wildly for some place to park his bike, Benedict works instead to re-call to mind how she’d looked last night, squirming gleefully beneath him in their bed. Her hands had clutched desperately at his biceps while he’d placed light, feathering kissing over each of her most sensitive spots, and she’d nearly squealed when his cupid’s bow ghosted low over her hip.

“Benedict!” she had gasped, her voice delightfully breathless.

“Yes?” he had teased, lifting his face to gaze back up at her. He’d quirked one eyebrow and she was undone.

“I love you,” she had said. Her voice had suddenly softened. His lips paused in their work, giving her time to catch her breath at last. Her chest rose and fell, rose and fell.

“I love you, too,” he’d said. He had flashed her his most uncontrollably crooked grin and her face lit up even more—she’d told him once that she hoped, one day, he’d reserve that smile for her alone. She had grabbed at his face, her hands cupping his jaw with such care, and brought it back up to meet hers, crushing her lips against his in a kiss that could only be described as ardent. When they broke apart, he had thought her smile was the most brilliant he’d ever seen…

It was so very much like the smile she had broken into the month before, when they’d sat across from one another at the Café de Flore in Paris and he’d slid an orange box to her over top the table.

“Happy Birthday, darling,” he’d said.

She lifted the golden Hermès scarf from inside and beamed at him.

“Oh, Benedict, it’s beautiful.” 

That scarf. That scarf. Soiled and forgotten on some Camden street.

Concentrate, Cumberbatch, he tells himself again.

Benedict parks his bike and rushes through the automatic doors into the blindingly white expanse of the A&E. Everything is suddenly very quiet, the roar of Saturday night traffic outside dying away with his first steps into the building. Half a dozen faces turn to look at him; they’re hunched over in their hard plastic chairs, all frown lines and tired eyes. Am I soon to join your ranks? he wonders.

He approaches the nurse’s station, still out of breath. He huffs out her name. “I think she was involved in a road accident. Is she here?” he asks.

“Are you family?” The nurse’s demeanor is not cold, per se, but it is patient and detached. She is middle-aged and is near the end of her shift; there is no amount of worry or desperation she has not seen before. She types the name into the computer but looks to Benedict for his answer, before she provides him anything more.

“I’m her boyfriend,” he says. The nurse nods and glances back at the screen.

“I’m afraid her condition is undetermined at the moment,” is all she says. Again she is detached.

“What does that mean, ‘undetermined’?” he asks, raking a shaking hand through his dark but fading curls. 

“It means she’s still with the doctor and her status hasn’t yet been determined.”

“But surely there’s something else in there… I mean, something about how she looked when she was brought in, maybe? Something.” His fingers are now drumming on the countertop and the nurse is giving him a withering stare. Undetermined could mean anything. There was a million miles between her having limped into the A&E with a mild concussion and her having been rushed in on a stretcher, they it all fell under “undetermined.”

“I’m sorry, Sir, but unless you’re immediate family, that’s really all the information I can release to you.”

“So what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to find out if she’s is okay?”

“If you’d like, you can have a seat over there”—she motions towards the wearisome cluster of despairing bodies he’d passed by on his way in—“until the doctor is through with her, and I’ll be able to update her condition. If she’s able to give consent, you’ll be allowed to see her then.”

He wishes he had a retort, wishes he could rip his heart open right then and there and let the nurse parcel through its contents until she finds what she needs to be convinced that I deserve to be in that room with her, holding her hand. But he who is usually so good with words, he who usually abuses his proficiency by refusing to ever let them cease tumbling from his mouth, is speechless. He does not know how to tell the nurse that he is only just beginning to understand how much of a light this woman is in his life, and he cannot lose her now. He swallows hard and backs away with what grace he can still manage.

“Yes, thank you. Please.” He slinks away and claims a chair half way between the nurse’s station and the swinging doors through which men and women in swirling white coats seem to appear.

\---------- ---------- ----------

Benedict doesn’t feel like he belongs here at all, sitting on an unyielding plastic chair in his bespoke Spencer Hart suit. He slouches easily—the hard surface is much too smooth—and then sits up immediately, crosses his right leg over his left and then quickly does the reverse. He stretches them both out before him, folding his arms over his chest, but none of it works, none of it placates him for a minute. His eyes flicker towards the swinging doors with every entrance and exit and the little dance is giving him a headache. 

He closes his eyes for a moment and pinches the bridge of his nose, but as soon as it goes black behind his eyelids, his mind feeds him every horrible image he’s spent the last hour willing himself to not be true: flashes of her tiny body shattered and bent around the backseat of an overturned cab; a paramedic cutting the scarf from her neck to try and find each of her hidden wounds, to try and fix them, to try and stop the spread of red; a hand at her neck and then her wrist, searching… searching…

No.

He changes the scene. He makes her stand up, makes her put herself together, makes her get back in the cab and drive all the way back to their flat, and he’s there and they’re together, giggling in the kitchen because he has flour all down his front and she has it in her hair and there is a tray of horrifically burnt cookies sitting on the hob. It’s last week. Every window in the flat is open but the smoke won’t clear. Her eyes are watering—not from the smoke, but from laughing. He lurches forward and grabs her around her waist, pulling her against him. She’s on her tiptoes and he’s leaning down and when their mouths come together, they both taste of cookie dough. And neither care that they’ve ruined the rest of the batch in the baking.

Things will be like that again. They’ll burn food and not care and reveal in the taste of each other, instead. They’ll laugh. She’ll smile. It will be okay. 

Benedict opens his eyes. There’s a doctor conferring with the nurse at the front desk and she’s looking straight at him as they talk. He can’t make out much, as the two seem to be murmuring to each other more than anything, but he straightens up, readying himself, steeling himself for what will come next.

“Mr. Cumberbatch?” the doctor asks as he approaches. Benedict is on his feet in an instant.

“Yes.”

“She’s asking for you,” he says. There’s a hint of a smile on his lips. Benedict hopes it’s sweet and not pitying. With a curt nod, Benedict follows the elderly man through those two ominous swinging doors and down a few twisting hallways. For some reason, neither man says anything. Maybe the doctor doesn’t think it’s necessary. Benedict doesn’t think he can. She’s awake, he reminds himself. She’s awake and that can be good enough for now.

The doctor pauses outside of a room, motioning for Benedict to enter first. He’s not sure he’s ready to see her stretched out on a hospital bed, hooked up to any number of beeping machines. He steps inside.

He stops.

She’s sitting on top of the made bed, running a hand idly through her wavy blonde locks. Her feet are tangling over the side and he notices her left ankle is wrapped; her barefoot toes just barely graze the cool tiles as they swing. 

“Benedict!” is exclaims happily, reaching her arms out towards him, not unlike a child. There is a small plaster high on her left cheekbone with a bruise blossoming beneath it; it crinkles up when she smiles at him. 

“You’re okay?” he says, not quite believing it. He answers her beckoning by wrapping his arms strongly around her shoulders. Standing before her, buries his face in hair and kisses the top of her head over and over.

“I’m fine,” she says with a small laugh. His kisses tickle. “A sprained ankle and a few scratches here and there, but I’m fine. There was this massive pile-up—“

“I heard. I saw, on the news,” he says. “God, I was so worried. There was this scarf…”

She touches her neck. “My scarf. Goodness, I forgot…”

“It was covered in blood.”

“There was a woman… she was bleeding everywhere. I was trying to help her.” Benedict only nods and kisses her forehead. She closes her eyes and hums contently. He kisses over the butterfly stitches on her cheek.

“I’m sorry I missed the premiere,” she says after a moment.

“What a ridiculous thing to say,” he tells her. “I love you.”

“And I love you,” she tells him, most ardently. 

And it’s enough, it’s all enough. She signs off on the last of the paperwork and insists she can hobble out with the help of a crutch, but Benedict won’t hear of it. He scoops her into his arms in a rather dramatic fashion and carries her out of the hospital, back to his bike where she wraps her arms around his middle and clings to him completely, back to their flat where he guides her into the bedroom and they reaffirm the three words they can’t stop saying to each other.

Fin.


End file.
